The importance of digital accessibility

More and more, we spend time interacting with digital devices. Increasingly, those interactions are not optional, but necessary. How much of your job could you do without your computer? How many businesses do you interact with that primarily have (or only have) an online portal?

What is digital accessibility?

Digital accessibility is access for disabled users. Working to make digital experiences accessible helps facilitate places where everyone has the opportunity to interact. If we plan, design, write, or build these tools and spaces without considering the needs of disabled users, we are facilitating the systemic exclusion of those users.

The current state of digital accessibility

The WebAIM Million project is a report on the accessibility of the top one million websites that people use as their browser’s home page. Nearly 97% of those one million websites had detectable accessibility failures in the last annual audit. The report was generated through automated scans, which don’t cover all accessibility requirements, so the number of accessibility issues was likely even higher than that.

How do I start?

You might be thinking, “I don’t make websites or web apps, how can I help improve digital accessibility?” You can still help, and we’ll be going over a brief list of ways you can do that. This list isn’t comprehensive, but it’s a good place to start.

Text

Ensure text is written as simply and clearly as possible. Over 130 million adults in the United States have difficulty with reading and reading comprehension. Less than 5% of the world uses English as their first language. Writing text to be easily-readable helps increase the chances that people will be able to understand the words you’ve written. This includes text in job postings, website copy, internal files, documentation, and anywhere else you write words down for others to read.

Images

If you’re posting, sharing, or including images somewhere, remember to also include descriptions for those images so that blind and low-vision users can appreciate and understand their context. Image descriptions are usually referred to as “alt text” or “alternative text”. If you have an image that’s mostly or only text in a fancy font, make sure that font is actually readable and contrasts enough with its background, and also include the text as the image description.

Videos

For videos, all of the previous advice about text and images applies. It’s also a good idea to include captions and transcripts wherever possible. Captions are synchronized text that can play over a video, and transcripts are a complete text of the spoken words provided for easier reading. Captions and transcripts are both tools that help people follow along with the audio and visuals of a video.

All of the previous guidelines also apply to social media, since these site and apps have lots of text, images, and videos on them. Additionally, capitalize each word in your hashtags so that screenreaders can pronounce them properly, add content warnings for potentially triggering content. You should also avoid using too many emojis at once, since screenreaders usually speak the full name of each one aloud.

Presentations

If you’re giving a presentation, use bigger fonts, don’t put too much stuff on the screen, and generally follow the previous guidelines for text, images, and videos.

Websites & web applications

If you’re building brand websites, landing pages, documentation, or web apps, try reading through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Run a Lighthouse accessibility scan from Google Chrome. Learn semantic HTML! All of the previous tips and many more are applicable to websites and web applications.

Key principles

Accessibility is not “one size fits all”

We talk a lot in accessibility spaces about the “curb cut phenomenon”: the idea that curb cuts, initially designed to make it easier for certain disabled pedestrians to use crosswalks, can also make it easier for non-disabled users to use those same crosswalks and sidewalks. However, designing for “everyone” instead of also including specific disability use cases can lead to curb cuts that aren’t actually accessible to the people that need them to get around. Just putting in a curb cut without considering the slope, the textured bumps, and other factors can lead to a sidewalk that isn’t very accessible at all. Not including disabled people in your focus groups, development, and testing can lead to the assumption that everything is “fine” or “good enough” when it’s actually quite the opposite.

Accessibility is customized experiences

Not everyone will be helped by every accessibility improvement we make, and some accessibility improvements are actually mutually exclusive. For example, some people need to use dark mode to help them read on digital screens, and other people have a harder time reading things on a dark background. Some people have an easier time listening to an audio recording, while others have an easier time reading text. These situations are called “conflicting access needs”, and they illustrate the importance of allowing people to customize their experiences. Light/dark and high-contrast modes, resizability, alternative device layouts, transcripts, and audio recordings are some of the options we can provide to make digital spaces as accessible as possible.

Accessibility is not a feature or a checklist

Accessibility is not a feature. It’s not something that we can trivially add later or drop from our requirements if our timelines “don’t allow for it”. Accessibility is not a checklist. Full content compliance or a perfect automatic accessibility scan doesn’t mean something is accessible to everyone, just like “100% ADA compliance” doesn’t mean a physical space is accessible to everyone. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and even the ADA, are comprehensively minimum standards. They are the baseline from which we should be building. The question “is it accessible?” doesn’t really mean anything until you dig in to the specifics of what access you’re providing.

Accessibility is everyone’s job

Whether you’re imagining new products or building new features or thinking about timelines or onboarding employees, dedicating time towards thinking about how to make things more accessible is part of everyone’s job.

Accessibility also needs leadership’s direct support

The motivation of a handful of individual contributors is not enough to sustain meaningful structural improvements. Accessibility work needs active support from leadership in order to allocate resources, allow for initiatives, and change culture.

Accessibility is a process

It’s not something we can fix overnight; it’s not something that we can eventually stop thinking about. It’s continual work towards improving the things we build and the spaces we provide. We all have a part to play in making the world a more accessible place.